If only I were a little more unscrupulous (or gullible) …I’d go to CMBF

I would love to visit China. I’d especially love to be invited to go there and have all my expenses covered. So when I got an official-looking invitation to a conference there a while back, I had a few milliseconds of enthusiasm, until I read a little deeper and my excitement got replaced with bafflement. I just turned away from it, but they keep begging me to attend. Here’s the latest letter from the China Medicinal Biotech Forum:

Dear Dr. Paul Myers,

This is redacted, the program coordinator ofthe 6th CMBF-2013. On behalf of the organizing committee of CMBF-2013, I sent you a formal Invitation Letter several weeks ago, which is regarding inviting you to participate in our forum as the Chair/Speaker of Session 7-2: Genetic and Cell Engineering Technologies for Biological Therapy. But we haven’t received any reply from you. In case of missing this grant event, I am writing again to extend to you our sincere invitation. Since we have learnt that you are making valuable contributions to Paul Myers…, your unique and inspirational message will definitely highlight the forum.

The 6th CMBF will be held on September 25-27, 2013 in Shenzhen, China. And it is hosted by CMBA, which was established in 1993 and consisted by 200 enterprise members and over 2000 professional individuals. It is on attachment to Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China, which is an executive agency of the state that plays the role of providing information, raising health awareness and education, ensuring the accessibility of health services, and monitoring the quality of health services provided to citizens and visitors in the mainland of the People’s Republic of China. It also cooperates and keeps in touch with other health ministries and departments, including those of the special administrative regions and the World Health Organization (WHO).

We have hosted CMBF for five times in Beijing, Shanghai, Qingdao and Dalian respectively. Each time was in every way extremely successful in spite of the preceding worldwide political and health problems. The strong attendance was a testimony to fact that the CMBF conference is well recognized as the most important international convention on China Medical Biotechnology.

The primary goal of this event is to provide a forum for the exchange of current information about new and emerging scientific knowledge, to discuss implications for future research and the application of new medicinal biotechnology, and to create opportunities for the collaboration and matchmaking between academia and industry. CMBF-2013 will focus on the following topics: Basic Research of Medical Biotechnology, Monoclonal Antibody, Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell, Bone Tissue Bank, Nanomedicine, Biomaterials, Novel Technologies for Biotherapeutics, Clinical Application Medical Biotechnology (Part I)-Biological Diagnostics, Clinical Application Medical Biotechnology ( Part II)-Therapy, Dietary Fiber.

For more information regarding CMBF-2013, please visit our conference website at http://www.medbioforum.org/.

We look forward to your active support and participation.

Sincerely Yours,

Weird. I’m not a biotechnology or biomedicine researcher. I do not do “Genetic and Cell Engineering Technologies for Biological Therapy”, but they’re asking me to chair a session on the topic? I think it’s very nice that they’ve noticed I am “making valuable contributions to Paul Myers…”, which is true, but I think that only qualifies me to chair a session titled “Paul Myers”. Even if I were confident that this were a legitimate research conference, I’d turn them down.

But I did dig around trying to find out more about them. They’ve had quite a few meetings, and they’ve had some prestigious attendees, including Nobelists. Maybe somebody on their administrative team is a master of SEO, because all I could find with a casual search (sorry, I’m not going, so I wasn’t going to dig deeper) were links to the group itself and to Chinese sources. The topics sound reasonable and legit, but far more applied than anything that would interest me.

But now I’m curious. There are a couple of possibilities here.

One is that it’s a great big scam. I’d agree, and then find myself paying for travel expenses that would never be reimbursed. If that’s the case, we should spread the word.

Another is that it’s a real conference for an obscure organization that has a great deal of Chinese government money thrown at it. They’re honestly reaching out to make connections with US researchers, but they don’t really know who’s who.

Another very remote possibility is that somebody there knows who I am, actually thinks I have a “unique and inspirational message”, and is trying to shoehorn me into a session that is unfortunately a poor fit. I can do a general rah-rah biology talk, but I’m not at all qualified to go into the details of stem cell research and biotechnology.

Anyone have prior experience with this group? If nothing else, promoting a little more second-party information about them on the web would be helpful.

Cupping is a thing? Really?

Taslima points to celebrities who are actually getting cupping done. It makes me wonder if they’re also getting bled, and whether they prefer leeches or the lancet. It’s medieval nonsense and total quackery.

I was wondering if there were any good analyses of this stuff, though, and my search turned up an unsurprising fact: WebMD, that popular website for Americans who can’t afford to go to a real doctor, is embarrassingly uncritical of cupping. In fact, they’re generally very woo-ish — I am once again made conscious of my class privilege, because when I feel sick I walk down the street to see a real doctor at nominal cost, because I’ve got good health insurance. Which makes me wonder some more — maybe universal health care would be a more effective means of curbing quackery than trying to educate everyone to be good skeptics. Sometimes, being skeptical is only an option when you can afford to question.

Stephen needs help

In America, if you’re a wage lackey who experiences a major health problem, you’re just out of luck — the working poor get thoroughly screwed by the system. Stephen Andrew of The Zingularity is working two jobs, coming off a major heart attack, and is about to be evicted from his home. I guess his real problem is that he’s one of the moochers who didn’t vote for Romney.

He’s looking for donations to tide him over this rough spot. If you’re one of those people with a stable income and good health and a bit of a surplus…oh, hey, that’s me! I should go click on his paypal button.

Update from Iain Banks

He’s still dying of cancer, but it’s good to see a godless heathen like him still finding happiness in his life.

Discovering the sheer extent and depth of the feelings people have expressed on the message board over the past two weeks has been truly astounding.

I feel treasured, I feel loved, I feel I’ve done more than just pursue the craft I adore and make a living from it, and more than just fulfil the only real ambition I’ve ever had – of becoming a professional writer. I am deeply flattered and touched, and I can’t deny I’ve been made to feel very special indeed. At the same time, though, I’d like to think that it’s like this for every author, to a greater or lesser degree; we’ve each engendered more love out there than we think we have, and it’s only the fact that I’ve been able to pre-announce my own demise that has allowed me to realise my portion of that love in full while I’m still around to appreciate it.

Now I’m thinking…I’ve never met him and I guess I never will now, but I should send him a note of appreciation. We’re all alone in this world except when we’re not, so making the effort to touch another human being is rarely wasted.

(Also…cancer sucks.)

Now I understand why the BBC pulled it

The BBC recently broadcast a program for the charity Comic Relief, but yanked one sketch deemed too offensive from their online iPlayer. They’d apparently received thousands of complaints about it, and it was the only sketch on the program found so horribly offensive.

Apparently, regulators are now investigating the BBC, and the ever-charming Daily Mail is blustering that “BBC faces Ofcom probe into Rowan Atkinson’s foul-mouthed Comic Relief archbishop impression”. Rowan Atkinson? Foul-mouthed comic? Did they confuse him with Gilbert Gottfried or something?

So I finally got a look at the ghastly wicked sketch, and now I see why it got people upset. Here it is:

Oh, yeah, that’s some primo religion bashing. “Foul-mouthed” is the wrong word, though: Rowan Atkinson’s sin was being deadly accurate, perfectly portraying the cheerfully vapid fluttery chumminess of a thoroughly liberal Christian. That’s what got people angry: he didn’t just start roaring at religious leaders, he showed the viewers what they looked like through our eyes…and it was also so damned close to how the believers see them, too, that it wasn’t easily dismissed and was a palpable smack in the face.

Excellent work, Rowan Atkinson!

Christina Amphlett has died

If you were ever into 80s pop, you’d know Christina Amphlett, the lead singer of the Australian band, the Divinyls. She’s had some rough years since, dealing with breast cancer and multiple sclerosis, which finally did her in this past weekend, at the too-young age of 53. (Cancer sucks, and so do progressive neurological disorders, and she suffered through both.)

Americans mainly know her for just one song, “I Touch Myself,” but she actually did a number of successful albums in her own country, so I thought rather than playing the most obvious one, I’d put up a different song.

How do we reduce crime?

Increasingly, this is the image we have of the police.

crimebusters

Terrifying, isn’t it? Once again, America reduces an abstract problem to the metaphor of war, and proposes armored vehicles and armored men with big guns as the solution. All we have to do is go in and kill crime, and we’ll be victorious!

Maybe, instead, we should try these 12 tactics that work first. Addressing the sources of the problem constructively seems infinitely preferable to waiting for criminals to do wrong so we can blow them away.

Maybe the right phrase is “revolutionary feminist”

The most “radical feminist” feminist I read religiously has got to be Twisty Faster, at I Blame the Patriarchy. She’s a ferociously passionate writer, and simply brilliant in her insights. So when we had the recent hatin’ and shriekin’ from #radfem2013, I had to wonder (maybe that’s the wrong word; I had high expectations) what Twisty would be saying on the issue. And have no fear, she’s all over it.

So, on a transwoman who was denied admission to Smith College, she writes:

So Wong can’t just declare herself to be whatever it is she is. Woman, they say, is denoted completely arbitrarily by lacking a dick. Not by any of the other factors that might just as easily be employed to differentiate members of the sex class from members of the regular class. Factors such as hormones or chromosomes or giggly head-tilts or — heaven forfend! — personal preference. The genitalia are the only thing anyone gives a fig about.

The carpet must match the drapes. One must be consistent, down below, with what one advertises up top. A girl can’t have a dick. The entire fabric of the universe, in fact, depends entirely on girls entirely not having dicks. No dicks, not of any kind.

That’s right; as is usual in all matters pertaining to everything, nothing matters but pure, unadulterated pussy. So Wong needs a doctor’s note stating that she’s had vaginoplasty. She must become legally penetrable. She has to get a fuckhole installed. That’s because the Global Accords define “woman” as “that which can be fucked.”

On the subject of radfems declaring transwomen as not fit for their movement, she’s got lots to say. Here’s the overview.

There are three aspects of this trans “debate” that particularly chap the spinster hide. One is that it is even considered a debate. Is there anything more demeaning than a bunch of people with higher status than you sitting around debating the degree to which they find you human? I don’t think so.

Go read the rest for her three aspects, but I have to mention her Four Ds:

Oppression is oppression. Race, ethnicity, religion, pigmentation, sex, gender, health, education, class, caste, age, weight, ableness, mental health, physical health, marital status, employment status, diet, IQ, internet access — any combination of these or a thousand other arbitrary markers may be used by the powerful to justify oppression, but the net result is always the same: discrimination, disenfranchisement, degradation, dehumanization. It’s the Four Ds! The Four Ds make all oppressed persons identical enough.

On almost every marker she lists, I’m one of the powerful…which means I have to be particularly careful not to turn my privileges into oppression.